All In the Family
by TheWhittiePhantom
Summary: While testing theories on time travel, Barry gets tossed through time and lands in his old house...about two years before Nora Allen was murdered. Pre "Out of Time"
1. Times Change

***Pre "Out of Time"**

Prologue.

Yawning, Barry stood up from the mass of blankets piled on the floor and stretched his arms towards the ceiling. After hours and hours of trying to make sense of Professor Stein's time travel equations, everything was starting to run together in a blurry mathematical mess.

To his right, Caitlyn was already dead to the world, silently snoozing in her brown silk pajamas. Cisco was technically awake, but only just. His eyes had started to glaze over, as if hypnotized.

Between bouts of taking criminals down, some people seemed to forget that for every minute of Barry taking down the bad guy, there were hours of prep work behind it to make that minute happen. Sometimes it meant helping Cisco with building gadgetry. Other times it meant helping Caitlyn sort through enormous amounts of medical data. Barry pitched in when he could, but sometimes even the combined minds of STAR Labs couldn't finish all of the work needed to make The Flash a reality. Even with Barry's speed helping.

So sometimes overnighters had to take place.

The first time it happened, they were trying to analyze Peek-a-boo's DNA. They spent all night throwing back coffee as if it was water and Barry used the shower usually reserved for scientists who spilled dangerous substances on themselves when he realized that he didn't want to go into work smelling like he did. Then another overnight happened. And then it happened again. After the fourth time, Barry not so subtly left a pair of pajamas in an empty lab room from STAR Lab's heyday. The next day, Cisco followed his example and left a blanket as well.

From then on, every time it looked like a full night of work was headed for them, the three of them grabbed their pillows and PJ's from the abandoned cubicle and set up camp while Dr. Wells muttered something about unprofessional employees. Barry would run out to get some food, and everyone would get down to work.

They were currently trying to combine their knowledge of Barry's older self being at the scene of his mother's murder and Stein's notes on time travel, with little success. Calculations and simulations had been running on the computer all night, and still, nothing. Barry was alternating between helping plug in variables to the computers and running at the speed they worked out to see if they could pick up any signs of tachyon particles or anything unusual.

Dr. Wells took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. "One more try Mr. Allen. Try running at Mach 1.5 with thirteen seconds of steady acceleration. Then we can call it a night."

Barry nodded and tapped his feet to get a little feeling into them. He was drained, both physically and mentally. One part of him was telling himself that every minute that he slacked off on the hunt for his mother's killer was another moment his dad wasted away in prison. His health-conscious side warned him that he was no good to anyone operating as a sleep deprived zombie. He walked onto the treadmill, then waited until Dr. Wells gave the signal that the treadmill had been set to the proper settings.

It started off slow, then got gradually faster. Barry could literally feel the lightning crackling around him, more and more of it until he couldn't feel the ground anymore. He was just moving forward, faster and faster, past the speed of sound, past the speed of everything.

Then nothing.

And in an instant, as far as his friends could see, he was gone. Vanished.

Inside the ball of lightning, surrounded by nothing, Barry panicked. Without a doubt, he wasn't in the lab anymore, although he could still hear Dr. Wells screaming his name. He had no idea where he was. He was going so fast that he couldn't make out anything around him, but somehow he knew that if he stopped, he would cease to exist. He just had to keep running. Instinctively, he _felt _ where he was going. Every time he felt a pull towards a certain direction, he ran toward it. Blind panic and cold fear formed a rock hard core in his stomach. Was he dead?

He couldn't say how long he had been running, seconds or hours, but suddenly he was out. The last thing he remembered was a familiar scent and hands grabbing at him. Then the world went black.

-13 years ago-

Joe pushed open the door to the Allen household, one hand on the door, one hand carrying the salad he had brought as his own contribution to dinner. Iris had already dashed in, and was already chatting Barry's poor ear off.

Henry greeted him at the door with a warm side-hug and ushered him inside. Ever since Barry and Iris had used the amazing power of puppy-dog eyes to convince their parents to let them have a play-date together, it had become a bi-weekly tradition for both families to eat dinner with each other and watch Barry and Iris have innocent fun while the three of them chatted.

Henry set down the salad on the already full-to-bursting dinner table and passed him a beer while Nora absentmindedly ruffled Barry's hair.

"So, this guy comes into the ER with a fractured skull. It took forever to get the reason why out of him, but apparently, his girlfriend cracked him over the head with a metal armadillo after she found out he was cheating on her," said Henry, eyes twinkling. "THAT was a fun insurance form to fill out, let me tell you."

Joe's eyes comically widened in mock offense. "If you think that is the height of stupid that happens in Central, in the break room-," he paused as the lights flickered throughout the house.

Barry and Iris stopped talking.

Then, right over the dinner table, in front of all of them, a small burst of white hot lighting crackled a thin young man with brown hair dressed in a black sweatshirt with some kind of white emblem on it fell out of thin air face first onto the dinner table, unconscious.

* * *

_A/N. Suggestions anyone? I absolutely adore time travel, especially when the same person can meet themselves and people can see how the character has grown. Again, I love suggestions, to feel free to comment._

_-2whitie_

**YES! As I said once and shall say again, expect me to beg you for updates. 8D Also, dat armadillo though... What you did there; I see it. XD (Inside joke, don't worry about it.)-Mumble**


	2. Soup

For a long moment, there was silence. Nobody moved.

Nora was the first to come back to life, and moved instinctively in front of Barry and Iris, who were staring with wide eyes at the man on the table. Henry felt numb. His eyes first darted to everyone else in the room, to confirm that everyone else had seen what had just happened, and that he was not crazy.

Joe was the first to make a move. Cursing himself for not bringing a gun, he moved carefully over to the man on the table. He stopped about halfway there and made a small shooing motion, indicating that everyone needed to get behind him. Nora complied, taking Barry and Iris with her. Henry, on the other hand, did the exact opposite, and padded up next to Joe, afraid that any loud noises might cause the man to disappear.

Joe was no longer Joe, Iris's dad. He was Officer West, someone with no time for any kind of nonsense. He turned to tell Henry to back off, but Henry had already set his jaw and had made his intent clear: he wasn't going to be pushed out of an incident that took place in his own home.

Methodically, one step at a time, both men gently moved toward the man, minds racing, eyes looking for different things.

Henry tried as best as he could to look for signs of injury without touching him. The man's chest was rising and falling evenly, and his color was good-so no lack of blood flow. No superficial injuries were present, muscle tone was good. There was something familiar about him, but he brushed it off without another thought. He worked in the emergency ward of the hospital, with new people flooding in and out everyday. It would be weird if he didn't look familiar at all.

Joe, on the other hand was analyzing him with a cop's gaze. Young caucasian male, probably in his early twenties. No visual tattoos or easy identifiers were present. Judging from his build, he worked out, but didn't get into fights-he lacked the necessary knuckle scars for that. With a bit of squinting, the black sweatshirt he was wearing was emblazoned with the name Star Labs. The name didn't ring a bell.

"Star Labs?" he quietly asked Henry.

The good doctor shrugged. "Never heard of them."

Neither of them were quite sure what to do. It was remarkable that they were able to think as rationally as they were-a guy had fallen out of a miniature cloud of lightning onto the table. At the same time, both men know that the minute they started to think about what had taken place, they would probably collapse to the floor and start spouting gibberish.

"Well," said Joe, trying desperately to act normal, "What do we do with him?"

Henry just shook his head, befuddled. Calling the police wasn't an option, even Joe recognized that.

Nora finally spoke up from behind them. "Move him to the upstair bedroom. When he wakes up, then we can decide what to do."

Glad to have a semi-plan to follow, Joe grabbed the unknown man under his arms and Henry grabbed his legs. They lifted him off the table slowly, and gently tilted the body to let some of the food that he fell directly onto fall off onto the floor. With a bit of maneuvering, the got him up the stair and laid him down on the guest bed. The minute he lost Joe's support of his upper body, his head lolled to the side onto the pillow.

Henry couldn't get out of the room fast enough, while Joe cast one last curious look at the figure on the bed before exiting the room and practically running after Henry down the stairs.

Nora was already cleaning up the dining room, trying to act normal for the sake of Barry and Iris whose gazes were trained on the guest bedroom like little bloodhounds.

Henry gently placed his arms on Nora's shoulders. "Nora. Honey. I have no idea what we are doing, but do you think that you, Barry and Iris could get out of the house until this is all sorted out? We don't know who this guy is, but I could never live with myself if he hurt you or the kids."

Nora gently shook her head, her loose red curls gently bouncing. "Where would we go? Let's keep this contained, here. In this house." With that, she looked over Henry's shoulder to Joe. "Why don't you and your daughter stay here? I would feel much better if the three of us took turns watching the... boy upstairs, and I'm sure Barry and Iris won't object to a sleepover."

At the word sleepover, Barry and Iris, silent up until this point, started buzzing excitedly. Possible alien AND a sleepover? This was the best dinner party ever!

Joe started to object, but Henry turned around and said, "I really would feel better if a cop was in the house while this entire, ah, situation gets sorted out." With that statement, he tried to smile shakily. "Somehow, that entire statement sounded normal. Unlike everything else tonight."

Clearly feeling outvoted, Joe slowly nodded his assent. "I'm going to go get my gun and a few clothes for Iris. Until I get back...do you mind watching him?" he asked, gesturing toward the poker near the fire.

Henry nodded, picking up the poker and heading back upstairs towards the guest bedroom.

Joe turned back to Iris. "Until I'm back, little lady, the Allens are in charge."

Iris nodded, the solemn little gesture completely at odds with her bright smile.

Joe left, closing the door behind him. Within a minute, everyone heard Joe's tires screeching out of the driveway, clearly trying to hurry.

It wasn't like when he woke up out of his coma, thought Barry. When he did that, he had a moment of fuzziness, then suddenly everything was crystal clear. This time, awareness returned agonizingly slowly. His mind seemed fully awake, but as hard as he tried, he couldn't sense anything but darkness. Slowly, he started feeling the beginnings of a monster headache. Then a metallic taste filled his mouth, not unlike the time he got beaten into a pulp by Girder. A warm light started pulling on the edges of his vision, but eventually, he gained control over his eyelids enough to open them.

He felt like Wesley from The Princess Bride, when he had just been revived by Miracle Max and could look around but needed Montoya to move his neck around for him.

Slowly, he started looking around. Then, he started trying to comprehend what was around him.

This was his childhood home.

This was impossible.

Cursing his inability to move, he could have sworn he heard someone shouting, "He's awake!" and a shuffle of feet.

The door to the room burst open, and for the second time in so many seconds, he knew he was seeing the impossible. His father, looking years younger, and out of prison. His mother, alive. His father was nervously carrying a poker from the fire with a guarded expression and his mother started to approach him with what looked like a canteen of soup. With every step she took closer to him, his dad jumped just a little.

He felt tears fill his eyes, and all he wanted to do was a mixture of joyful shouting and crying. He didn't care how or why. Somehow, he had his parents back. It crossed his mind briefly that this could be a dream, but he immediately brushed it off. He had been working on time travel, and here he was, back in the past.

It was sad how fast he immediately went for the time-travel explanation before any others.

He wanted to ask what was wrong, but then his reasoning skills started to kick in. If he had really traveled back in time, then his parents had no idea who he was. He was a stranger to them. They had never even seen a speedster before, or had any idea the kind of weird that Central City could produce.

His mother gently propped up his head on the pillow and began spooning what tasted like Grandma Allen's special tomato soup into his mouth. The aroma itself awakened an entire array of childhood memories, and he wanted to let loose a fresh stream of tears the minute the familiar spices and flavors touched his tongue. The sheer domestic gesture was...Barry didn't even know how to describe his feelings. Joe had been great, more than he could have asked for, but since he was eleven, Iris had been the sole female influence in his life.

This was the first time in umpteen years that someone had fed him soup like this.

Finally, the tears started falling. He knew he must have looked a sight, an unknown twenty something who had been up all night, unable to do much more than swallow, crying his eyes out.

Henry made a jerky move forward, concerned with his wife's safety. He placed his hand on her shoulder gently. "Not too much, he might throw it all back up."

Nora nodded and rose off the bed, taking the soup with her. She gave him a small smile and left the room.

His father trained a suspicious gaze on him, a look that Barry had long come to associated with the phrase, "Who started the fight?"

Just then, Joe burst into the room. "The police department called. They want every cop on the street, on or off duty. There's been a robbery and it's the strangest thing-everyone in the store went crazy, attacking one another. Thier brain scans show irregularities in whatever causes them stop themselves from doing whatever random destructive thing that pop into their heads. Everyone reports seeing red right before they went psycho." He shook his head, clearly ready to find whoever had crafted this day for him and shove them into the sewer.

The soup had acted like a warm bullet coursing through his body, waking up his throat enough to push a few words of warning out, his sore throat disguising his panic and disbelief about the entire situation. "Roy G Bivolo."

As one both men turned to look at him, Joe just then realizing he was awake.

He made another attempt at speaking normally. "The robbers' name is Roy G Bivolo."

* * *

_A/N. I confess. The entire reason I wrote this fic was too get that scene with his mother feeding him soup. Thank you for all the reviews! To answer one of the reviews, yes, Barry did fall face first into the food, because that's just his luck. And the armadillo will probably make several appearance-if not in this fic, in another one. Its an ongoing gag between me and Mumble, my partner in crime who shares this account with me._

_-2whitie_

**Oh gosh, more armadillos... xD And I'm fixing to write a full chapter story just for the sake of one moment of it, too, so you're completely forgiven. ;)**

**-Mumble**


	3. Teaming Up

Even as he said the words, Barry doubted himself. Without a doubt, Bivolo was the only one with the power to force anger onto somebody. At the same time, there was no way that Bivolo was a metahuman at this point in time.

Unless…

It was so obvious. The solution was so simple. Anyone who had taken sixth grade science technically had the answer. Unfortunately, until his body could recover enough to roll out of bed, there was nothing he could do about it. Even worse were the implications.

Joe's, "I will cut you," cop-voice broke his train of thought. "You were saying, Mr…?"

Barry spat out the first name that came to mind. He certainly wasn't going to say his real name. "Uhhhh...Oliver."

Joe gave him The Look. "Try again."

Barry shrugged unapologetically. He couldn't even go by his middle name, under the circumstances, and there was no amount of money in the world that could make him say Bartholomew. "Can I tell you the name I used on my fake I.D in college?"

The seemingly regular-sounding statement seemed to relax Henry at least a little bit. Him knowing what college was and admitting to breaking the rules ruled out alien on the list of possibilities regarding what he could be.

For a moment, Joe seemed torn. He couldn't decide what he wanted to question him on first. Finally he solved the internal debate by making a "by all means," gesture towards him.

"Wally was the name on the I.D. I didn't choose it," he said a bit defensively.

"Wally it is," said Henry, who was just glad to be making headway. "Better question. How-or why-did you fall out of a small lightning cloud above my table?"

Barry decided a very edited version of the truth was the best answer. "It was sort of an accident."

Seeing that broad questions were not going to work, Joe asked about the other thing he wanted to know about. "What do you know about this Bivolo character," he asked, pulling out a notebook.

Barry pushed down a small smile. Once a cop, always a cop. "Twenties, cropped light brown hair, brown eyes, usually wears glasses. Average height, skinny and carries around a light brown knapsack," he recited as Joe started scribbling. "He mainly targets banks, but doesn't exactly hesitate to use his..um..talents on anyone who tries to take him in."

Joe raised a single eyebrow. "Care to expand on your definition of the word talents?"

Barry winced. He had known that question would be coming. "I really don't think you would believe me."

Henry huffed a little bit. "Kid, if you want him to believe the impossible, you did a mighty fine job demonstrating that the impossible exists."

Feeling strong enough to sit up, Barry moved his back up against the headboard, feeling a little irrationally hurt when both men jumped at him moving. "Bivolo is a metahuman." Sensing the question before it came, Barry started again, unknowing echoing Joe from the future. "Metahumans are individuals with very powerful abilities. Bivolo, he can just look at somebody and force them go off on an angry rampage. He can force a gentle mother to pick up a gun to shoot at somebody, he can cause friends to engage in a fight to the death."

Joe just looked like he wanted to fold up this entire day and put it into a coffin.

Henry addressed the elephant that had suddenly popped up in the room. "Are you one of these...metahumans?"

The question gave Barry pause. He never cared when the term was applied to him by his friends at Star Labs, it was just a statement of fact. However, he had to wonder. The minute he said yes, he would be mentally placed in the category of, "not human," by two of the people that he valued most in the world. he knew that they were fine with it in the future, but would they be fine with it when it was somebody they didn't know?

The conflict on his face was all the answer that Joe needed.

And the look on both men's faces broke Barry's heart.

He knew that both men cared about him deeply in normal time. He had never harbored any doubts about it. Suddenly, however, the thing that made him more of who he was set him apart. To know that the knee-jerk reaction to his abilities was wariness and fear from some of the best people he knew...there wasn't really a word for it. A wave of pity and depression didn't quite describe it. He honestly wasn't sure if his feelings were so damaged that he just couldn't feel anything, or if his body was delaying his emotional reaction because his own body knew he wouldn't be able to handle it. Or if he just wasn't physically able to process that much pure despair.

He was done talking. He couldn't even if he wanted too. He just turned over and stared at the wall in abject misery. He had went from crying tears of almost-joy to holding back a wall of pain in a matter of minutes. He was spent. Done.

Sensing that they had touched a sore spot, Henry and Joe looked at each other and left without another word. It was clear that they wouldn't be getting anything further out of him.

Outside the door, Henry and Joe just looked at each other.

"You believe him?" asked Joe carefully.

Henry, in the exact same manner as his son, waited a beat before answering. He scanned the place he called home around him. The staircase, Barry's room, the living room with his mother's mirror...all of this would no longer be a safe haven on certainty if he said yes. Yet, as Sherlock Holmes once said, Once you've eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be true.

"Yes."

Joe sighed. "I was kind of hoping you would be able to make an argument that would convince me otherwise." He rubbed his forehead. "Look. I'll go down to the station and see what I can dig up. Did you get it?"

Henry nodded, handing him the spoon that the metahuman had gulped soup out of. "I took it out of the bowl as Nora was leaving. Should have a good DNA sample on it. Maybe we can get something out of it."

Joe nodded and carefully placed the all-telling spoon in his pocket. "I'll ask one of the techies to look at it. I can tell them it was from a lab that got robbed or something to explain anything weird."

Henry nodded, suddenly exhausted. "I'm going to help Nora clean up the dining table..or something," he said, suddenly feeling torn between finding something menial to do to keep his mind busy or run back in the room to try to take back whatever he had said that made the young man so unhappy. The second he started talking, something about him made Henry lower his defenses and want to make the kid as comfortable as possible.

As both men walked off, two little sets of eyes watched them go.

"They gone?" asked Iris.

"Yeah. Doorway is clear. I repeat, doorway is clear."

Sliding across the wooden floors of the second level of the house in their socks, Barry and Iris crept up to the room of the unknown visitor and pushed the door open, inch by inch, feeling like rebels.

The man inside looked as dejected as a person could possibly be, even as his body was practically smashed into the bed in a very non-intimidating fashion.

Barry peeped his head back around the corner as fast as he could, but the man had already seen him.

"It's okay to come in, you know."

Barry's green eyes about popped out of his skull. "He can speak English!" he whispered to Iris, who couldn't decide which direction to run, into our away from the room.

"He can hear you."

Barry slapped a hand over his mouth. Iris had apparently come to a decision and decided that Barry was coming with her. She grabbed Barry's hand and frogmarched him to the comfortable chair near the desk in the corner of the room, sat them both down, and primly turned to face Barry, clearly trying to act like an adult.

"Are you from outer space?"

Older Barry felt his heart lighten, even just a little bit. He briefly considered not answering, in case he wrecked the time stream even further, but if he was right about his theory for why Rainbow Raider was here, then it might be a good thing to wreck it just a little bit more.

"No."

"So you don't work on the Enterprise?"

"No."

Both kids looked so massively disappointed by this development that the wasteland that was his emotional state right then almost lightened enough to make him want to smile. Almost. He decided to throw them a bone.

"I work as a forensic scientist."

Little Barry's head popped up. "Really?"

"Yep. The detectives find me the evidence and I tell them what it means."

Little Barry looked so pleased by this that he was pretty sure that his younger self had just joined his older self's fanclub. Did that count as narcissism?

"Are you from the future?" asked Iris, who clearly wanted to resume the interrogation.

Older Barry simply whistled a few bars from the classic Doctor Who theme, knowing his younger self would get the reference. The widening of little Barry's eyes confirmed it.

"How far?"

Barry responded by putting a finger to his lips.

Iris pouted. "Nobody tells me anything. Like this morning, when all my Dad's detective friends got all quiet when I went up to them. All I heard was that for some reason, one of the Mardon brothers had been spotted. Clem or something like that."

Full-scale alarm bells started to go off in Barry's head. He was right! He forced himself to shove away all the hurt he felt inside. Joe was in trouble, and soon. He had to hurry. He leaned forward, the weakness leaving his body in a flood of urgency. "I need to get to Joe. He's in trouble."

Iris immediately narrowed her eyes. Before she could object, he cut in. "I'm from the future, so I know this kind of thing, ok? I'm going to need some help."

Iris didn't remove her suspicious look. "Am I being manipulated?" she asked, pronouncing each syllable carefully.

"Yes. That's not the point. I just need you to trust me enough to distract my mo-Mrs. Allen long enough for me to sneak out and help him. Please?"

Iris was still suspicious. Rolling his eyes impatiently, he gestured for little him to come close. Trustingly, little him came without hesitation. Little him was so innocent.

He leaned forward enough to whisper in his ear. "I know about the time you nearly ruined Noah's Ark by slipping a live ferret onto the stage because you felt the set wasn't realistic enough."

Barry looked a little panicked. "I never told anybody about that."

"You trust me enough in the future to tell me. Even the part about the lead actor having an allergic reaction to the ferret when it climbed up his robe."

Barry was suitably convinced. He nodded to Iris. "We can trust him."

Satisfied, Iris went downstairs to pester Nora, while Older Barry threw his legs over the bed, ready to dash out the door the minute he heard the two of them walk away from the door.

Before he left, he took his younger self and looked him in the eye. "Someday, something really bad is going to happen. Just remember to always believe in the impossible? Can you do that?"

Little Barry nodded so hard that his older self feared his headmight fly off.

He smiled at himself, then ran as fast as he could without using his powers down the steps and out the door.

Once he got to the closest ATM, he drew a little bit of money from the Queens' bank account. (He remembered the number from the time Oliver had rented him a suit for the Christmas gala.) He felt bad about it,and resolved to pay Oliver back, rationalizing that Oliver would probably appreciate the money more now that he wan;t a billionaire, and that all the current money sitting in his bank account would eventually become Isabel Rochev's.

After zipping into a clothing store to get a red sweatervest, a black shirt to go under it, and some jeans, he ran to the police station. Seeing no better option, he flashed-yes, that was now a verb-into the part of the station where I.D. cards were made and printed himself off some identification, then pinned said I.D to his shirt.

This was the point in the plan where everything could go wrong.

He walked up to where Joe sat talking to one of the detectives about something, probably the Bivolo case. He caught the end of the conversation.

"-handed the spoon off to one of the consulting lab rats, think his name was Wells. He can probably get something off it."

The detective Joe was talking to finally noticed him. "Who are you?"

Joe turned, saw Barry, and his expression was the oddest mix of surprise, anger, and panic. Barry wanted to burst out laughing just looking at it. He resolved to just not look at him, so he wouldn't start giggling while talking to the detective.

"Wally West. I'm here for the Bivolo case...We have a similar case in Starling City."

Oh how times had changed.

Joe's face was priceless. Being a bit of a troll had its perks.

The Detective looked oddly at him. "West? Are you two…?" he clearly didn't see any relation, but felt obligated to ask.

Before Joe could tackle him, Barry butted in. "Not by blood. Foster." He had learned that when he said that, people stopped asking questions.

The detective nodded with a quiet, "Oh," leaving Joe to have a silent aneurysm. "Well, this is convenient then. Why don't you two collaborate evidence and see what you come up with?"

Barry smiled amiably. "Exactly what I was hoping for, Sir."

* * *

_A/N Well, this story went a completely different direction that I thought it would. That was fun. And yes, the reason metahumans are i the past will be explained….*teehee. _

_-2whitie_

**Love it when that happens... If your characters don't have minds of their own, then you've got sucky characters. In other words, LET THE FUN CONTINUE. And I would certainly hope that you have a nice, shiny cement truck to fill in that gaping plothole in with. Can't wait to see it, I bet its got a sweet paint job and everything. :D**

**-Mumble**

_Hint: think Newton's laws of motion, taken completely out of context :)_

_-2whitie. _


	4. Velociraptor

**Present Time. The doctor's office. **

Doctor Stevens looked over his medical chart at Detective West, who was sitting on the edge of the hospital bed with his arm bandaged up. He knew he was going to regret asking, but he knew he had to.

"Explain for me again exactly what happened."

Joe sighed. All he wanted to do was get out of this place and help Barry, but the doctor was holding everything up.

Captain Signh answered for him. "He came into work today frazzled. I asked him what was wrong, but he just said it was a family matter, so I left it at that. A few minutes later, I noticed that he was holding his arm funny, so I ordered him to take off his jacket, and he had a white bandage wrapped around his arm. I asked him if he had been to see a doctor, and he said no."

Doctor Stevens rubbed his nose. "Well, I want an explanation just as much as you do, Captain. Whoever stitched this wound up knew what they were doing-it's a fancy piece of embroidery."

Joe raised his eyes to the ceiling. _Thank you Caitlyn._

"However," the doctor continued, "I really want to know what caused this wound. This wasn't made by anything normal."

Everyone in the room looked at Joe expectantly.

"I'm a bit of a klutz?"

** Star Labs. **

"Thank goodness we were able to get that dinosaur tooth out of Joe's arm," commented Caitlyn, somewhat randomly.

Cisco looked around at the carnage. "This is not how Star Sleepovers ™ are supposed to go," he said, decisively.

Wells was sitting in front the empty metahuman prison cage where the Rainbow Raider used to reside, nursing a bullet wound from a civil war musket ball. "Well, now we know that Barry has even less control over his abilities than we thought he did."

Cisco snorted in agreement. "Word."

The minute Barry had disappeared in a cloud of lighting, Wells had started to scream his name, and then everything had gone to heck.

The lighting clod, instead of going away startedwidening and began shooting bolts everywhere. One went straight through the prison cage, struck Bivolo and had him disappear in the same way Barry had. Another bolt shot through the air, then dissolved into thin air.

All around them, little clouds popped up and let parts of the past straight through. Joe, who had been on his way in to check in on Barry, met a velociraptor that had come through one of the holes. Wells had gotten shot by a confederate soldier before the soldier got pushed back into the timestream, and it was a miracle Caitlyn and Cisco hadn't gotten hurt. After about two of the most frightening minutes that had ever taken place at STAR labs - which was saying a lot-the "storm" went away as quickly as it had come.

Wells immediately theorized that Barry was somewhere in the past, mucking up the timestream. His lack of control over his abilities dealing with time probably dragged back Bivolo with him, and that all of the lightning bolts that had vanished into thin air had probably made another time jump, and struck someone in a different time.

Joe didn't really care about the theories of Dr. Wells. He had just wanted to know if Barry was alright, and he had said so.

Wells had shrugged rather dramatically. "Impossible to know. We might get a few more surprises from the time stream the more he tears it apart from whereever he is. Time will try to fix itself before it all falls apart, but Barry needs to walk a fine line. As long as he keeps changing things, the easier we can pinpoint his temporal location. However, if he changes too much…,"

Joe finished the sentence for him, the full weight of what he was saying hitting him like an anvil. "He may be stuck in the past forever."

Dr. Wells nodded. "Not only would he be stuck in the past, time would change enough to completely split off into a new timestream. He would be in the past, in a different reality." With that, he turned his wheelchair towards his computers, eager to start making calculations, almost comically ignoring the fact that Caitlyn was chasing him with bandages and gauze for his bullet wound.

Joe had gotten busted by the Captain after being at work for only a few minutes. Hopefully, he could come up for a good excuse for his injury. Something other than the truth.

**The Past. **

Joe managed to keep it together long enough for "Wally West" to get into the patrol car with him. The nanosecond the door slammed shut, Joe grabbed the young man by his jacket.

"What on EARTH do you think you are doing?"

The man jumped like a startled cat as best as one could while their coat was being held in a death grip. Then, after a split second of what looked like indecision, his face smoothed out into an expression that wasn't taking, "No, you cannot tag along" for an answer.

It was one of Joe's least favorite expression.

"The way I see it, we both want to catch Bivolo. We both want to keep this entire metahuman mess under wraps, unless you want to explain exactly what's going on to all of your colleagues, and we both know that the cops won't be able to handle this guy. Seems like we pretty much want the same things," said Barry, trying to get everything out in one breath.

With a pause, Joe let go of Barry. The little amount that he had spoken had given Joe a wealth of information. The brief panic and resignation to being manhandled told him that the kid wouldn't jump to a violent defense if provoked, so he probably didn't have a violent temperament. The fact that he didn't use any of his alleged abilities meant that the kid tried to use his wits before trying anything else, which hinted that he didn't use his powers as a crutch. Joe could respect that.

"We do this my way," said the cop, gruffly.

Barry looked like the poster child for sheer relief. After taking a quick second to compose himself, he let himself concentrate on the case. "Bivolo knows that most banks have trackers on the money, but I'm willing to bank on the fact that he may just be too smart for his own good."

He paused waiting to see if Joe was listening. After a grudging, "go on," gesture, he continued.

"Bivolo is from the future..with futuristic ways of tracking money."

Joe, thrown for a minute by the future comment, quickly caught on. "You're saying that Bivolo would only remove the devices he is used to seeing from the future, but wouldn't be looking for devices used now."

Barry nodded excitedly. "Exactly. Money is made of a special blend-only the treasury can use it. Central used to spray their money, until a much less expensive system of electronic tags was put into play. Do you still use the spray?"

Joe nodded, with a cat-that-got-the-canary grin spreading across his face despite himself. "We got him."

A few calls later, and the location was sent to Joe's email. Predictably, it was an abandoned warehouse. Without a word, Joe hit the gas towards the address, ready for a fight.

**The Allen House.**

"You let him get away?!"

Barry and Iris tried to look as sorry as they could while Henry Allen grilled them both. Nora eventually took pity on the youngsters and put a gentle hand on her husbands back.

"Henry, it was our own fault. We should have never left them in a position to talk to him."

Henry let out a long-suffering breath, and little Barry suddenly did actually feel bad. "It's fine. We weren't in any danger."

"You didn't know that."

"Yes we did! He knew a really big secret of mine, one I haven't told anybody! He said that I trusted him enough in the future to tell him!"

Both Henry and Nora looked at each other in sheer panic, about to wildly rip into their son about trusting strangers, when the phone rang. Barry and Iris visibly relaxed, glad for a reprieve. Henry rubbed his eyes, feeling as if he had aged at least ten years, then picked up the phone.

"Hello? Yes, this is the Allen household...I didn't think civilians could get information from an ongoing case file...What do you mean about a family clause...oh, my son, Barry. He's nine...what do you mean, that's impossible? No, I am not giving my son anything experimental!"

There was a long pause as Henry processed the information that the lab scientist on the other end of the phone was feeding him. Unlike Joe, who usually had Barry translate anything relating to science, Henry just listened to the play by play of the impossibilities that the provided DNA sample had thrown up, last of which was that the DNA was an exact match to that of one Barry Allen. Apparently, he had been able to bring up DNA samples to tell the computer to ignore since other people had touched the spoon that the DNA had been delivered on, but one of the first samples he had brought up to eliminate was a perfect match. However, upon closer inspection the DNA that he was supposed to be examining was nowhere near normal. There was no doubt, though, that both samples belonged to the same person.

Henry managed a strangled, "Thank you," before somehow dropping the phone into its cradle before giving Barry a good long stare. He didn't have the faculties to do much else.

Nine year old Barry, who had just happily letting his father talk on the phone and not chew him out was unnerved by the stare. "What?"

**Joe's Squad Car.**

Standing outside the warehouse, Barry handed Joe a pair of mirrored sunglasses that he had insisted they pick up before they confronted Bivolo. "Don't let him look at you without these," he advised.

Joe nodded, testing the padlock. It was bolted shut.

Barry gave him the universal motion to back off. He grabbed the lock with his hands and vibrated the entire thing clean off.

Even though he had been expecting something unusual, Joe couldn't stop his jaw from meeting the floor. He managed to school his expression into something neutral before the kid looked at him, almost searching for...approval?

Joe simply pointed his gun into the darkness, and Barry panned the room with a flashlight.

A voice came out from somewhere in the darkness.

"I have to say, this is a bit of a surprise. Before I force you two to kill one another, how did you find me?"

* * *

**A/N: No note? Hmmmm... Well, I'll go first then.**

**I like this chapter... I really really _really_ like this chapter a lot. :D I think it might be my favorite chapter so far. Dinosaurs and Confederates... LAWL**

_A/N Yep. I kind of wish this kind of timey whimey stuff would happen in the show...on the other hand, this is a prime example of why it's a good thing I don't write for the show. _

_...about that scene we talked about with Barry on Redbull..._

_-2whitie_


	5. The Amarillo Ate Subway

Henry Allen hadn't moved from the position he was in since he put the phone down. He just kept staring at Barry, trying to reconcile the young man who had recently been lying unconscious on the bed to the nine year old staring innocently up at him.

There was no way it was possible. Sure, there were a few things in common, but anybody could have brown hair and green eyes. Sure, they had similar ticks and manner of speaking now that he thought about it, but there was a very good chance that the only reason he could see anything in common was because he was actively looking for things in common.

The young man from earlier and Barry being the same person was simply out of the question.

The polite man on the phone, a Dr. Wells, had been adamant about the entire thing. One hundred percent on the DNA match. There were several inconsistencies, though. He would be able to get more answers with a blood sample from both subjects, but the sample on the spoon was not normal human DNA. It had been twisted out of recognition. He had very lightly broached the subject of a possibility of Barry being exposed to illegal substances or tests, but a firm word from Henry had shut him up about the subject. Then he had asked if it would be okay to come over and examine Barry.

Henry, with only a beat of hesitation, said yes. He wanted this mystery, this mystery that was dangerously close to his family, gone. And if he could keep it all under the table, well, even better.

Nora, who had been silent in the corner of the room since the phone call, finally approached him.

"What's going on, Henry?"

Henry blinked himself out of his stunned stupor, then turned to Barry and Iris. "Can you two go to the living room and sit there? Maybe play Go Fish or something?"

Barry and Iris, sensing that this was not a time to argue, made two identical little 90 degree turns and hurried into the living room.

He had no idea how to phrase this. He gently took his wife's hands, then said in a low voice, "Joe and I sent a DNA sample of the young man to a scientist who was doing a bit of consultant work at the station. He just called back to wonder why we had sent him a copy of our own son's DNA."

He waited for the penny to drop. He didn't have to wait long. Nora was as smart as she was nurturing, and her eyes widened to almost a comical level. "But, that's…"

Henry nodded, interrupting. "Impossible? I know. What's more, the DNA sample had a lot of errors in it, like something was really messed up about it. He asked to come over to see Barry personally to make certain that he was looking at DNA from the same person.

Nora nodded. She would have suggested the exact same thing herself. "When is he supposed to be here?"

As if in answer, the doorbell rang. Nora got to the door and opened it as if she were inviting a close family friend in.

Standing inside the doorway was a tall thin man with a shock of black hair with blue eyes. He seemed to have a youthfulness about him, an energy that displayed itself with the slightly nervous way that he touched his glasses to the almost perky way that he practically jumped forward to shake Nora's hand.

"Hello," he said, extending his hand out for a handshake. "My name is Harrison Wells, and this," he gestured to a woman that came out from behind him, "Is my wife Tess Morgan. Can we come in?"

…

**Present time. **

Cisco shoved a stack of papers to the side of the table. "Nope. Nothing. Nada. Noodle."

Caitlyn shook her head. "There has to be more."

Test after test had been run on the entire treadmill room to see if they could get any readings at all from where Barry has disappeared. LED, Ultraviolet, even scans using lenses meant for astronomy had yielded nothing.

It was by complete accident that they had found anything.

Being a research lab with many confidential projects, Star Labs had always had good security, including a closed WiFi. It also had its own satellite that sent private updates to the lab. Including weather scans.

After detecting several abnormalities, the satellite sent an update to Cisco's phone. At first, he ignored it. Central City was in the midwest, meaning anything less than an F-4 tornado wasn't anything to get excited over. After the third update, he finally looked closely at the updates.

Every single one of the "storms" that the satellite was finding coincided directly with one of the time storms.

Which meant going through pages and pages of satellite readings. Every time they found a reading that looked like a mini hurricane, they circled it in red ink and laid it out in a timeline.

At least the work was going faster than it normally would. During one of the time storms, they hadn't been able to shove one of the poor figures who came through fast enough, so they were getting help from a Roman soldier, who was taking the future surprisingly well.

Looking at the suspicious stains on the guys's armor, Cisco was only too glad that Dr. Wells was fluent in Latin.

Joe came around at lunchtime with Subway for the crew and saw Dr. Wells and a rather rough looking man dressed in a tunic conversing softly in Latin while everyone was silently circling different readings on weather maps. He was tempted to just ding dong ditch the sandwiches and run before his day got any worse.

Caitlyn saw him, smiled and came to relieve him of the sandwiches. "You are a saint," she muttered softly.

Joe just gestured with his forehead toward the roman chatting with Dr. Wells with a red permie in his hand.

Caitlyn understood. "Oh. Claudius. He came through the timestream and we weren't able to shove him back in, so until we fix the timestream, he's staying with us." She shrugged.

Joe rolled his eyes. "Remind me when this became normal."

Cisco came up and grabbed his meatball sandwich. "I just don't think about it anymore, or I might explode from happiness. Anyway, down to business. We pulled, well, we...acquired...readings from other satellites to supplement our own data. At first, it looked like there wasn't a pattern to the storms. Then, we noticed something. We are getting readings consistently in Central. Like, on the hour consistent. everywhere else is scattered. Different times, different places. No pattern there. However, the consistent timestorms-which is totally what we are calling them-started about 16 years ago. I know I'm about to run around in theory land now, but I would bet my last dollar that consistent damage is being done to the timestream 16 years ago. Everything else is the timestream trying to fix itself."

Joe tried to concentrate of Cisco's words without snatching too many glances at the young roman. "Have any idea how long it will take before any real damage is done?"

Cisco shook his head. "No idea. I wouldn't know where to start."

Lowering his voice, Joe talked while staring at Claudius and his struggle with sticky notes. "Anything else?"

Cisco looked uneasily at Caitlyn, who sighed, then squared herself up to tell Joe the bad news. "Barry needs to stop messing with time. The more damage is done, the harder it will be for Barry to get back."

**The Past. **

Joe kept his gun trained on Bivolo. "Hands on your head."

Bivolo didn't even bother. He just turned around and looked a little over their heads. "I asked how you found me."

Joe ignored him. "Hands. On. Your. Head."

Bivolo melodramatically shrugged, then looked both of them directly in the eyes.

Nothing happened.

Bivolo looked surprised, then strained his eyes again. It was hilarious to Barry and irritating to Joe.

Barry tapped the lenses covering his eyes. "Mirrored sunglasses, dude."

In that instant, Bivolo looked like he was going to start letting out an unstoppable stream of expletives, but before his ears could be abused, Joe stepped forward and started cuffing Bivolo, who stood unresisting, stunned.

After bundling him into the back of the car, both men climbed into each side of the patrol car and just looked at each other.

"We can't just turn him over to the police. Not with what he can do," said Barry.

Joe sighed deeply. "What do you want to do with him, then?"

Barry had an answer prepared. "I bring him back with me to my own time, where I can put him back into a prison built specially for metahumans."

With a nod, Joe acquiesced. It was the best he was going to get.

For a few moments, there was blissful silence.

Then a small storm of lightning opened right in front of them. Barry's eyes, out of habit, began to process the images going to his brain at super speed and was able to put together an image of a room at Star labs.

He had a way home.

Without warning, he threw himself sideways out of the car, ignoring Joe's cry of alarm. He sped into the back of the car, grabbed Bivolo and zoomed toward the opening in time. Now a dark figure started to cover up his view of the lab. With a cry of desperation, Barry tossed Bivolo in ahead of him, but even the fastest man alive was too late. The hole had closed, taking Bivolo and any chance that Barry had of getting home.

Too frustrated to do much more that act like a child, Barry punched the air, gave the ground a good hearty kick, and let out a good old fashioned yell.

Joe, who had nearly given up the ghost when he saw "Wally" disappear next to him and move quicker than the eye could see, had decided enough was enough. He climbed out of his cruiser and gave the young man a hard stare. "Done?"

Barry, struck by the rebuke, looked down at his feet and saw the trench caused by his foot and the pile of dirt next to it. He ashamedly felt like a kid again, one who couldn't control his emotion. "Yeah."

Joe pointed to the passenger seat.

Barry climbed in silently.

As he started up the car, Joe looked Barry in the eye. "You are going to start talking. Now."

For a moment, Barry thought about running. Then he thought about lying through his teeth. Then he realized that Joe was good at ferreting the truth out of good liars, let alone horrible ones like him. So, he decided that a very condensed generic story with little detail would serve his cause the best.

"When I was eleven, my mother was murdered."

Joe stopped himself from showing any reaction, but only just. For as many years as he had been at the police department, he could never just "get used" to the horror stories that came through.

"The police arrested my father for the crime, and they didn't believe me when I told them the real story about what happened that night. A man in yellow, moving as fast as lightning stabbed my mother. But when the police came, all they saw was my fathers fingerprints on the dagger and the blood on his hands from when from when he tried to save her. I moved in with the cop who put my innocent dad away. Then, about nine months ago, a scientific experiment went wrong. Central city was the site of a massive explosion of dark matter. I became a metahuman, possessing the exact same abilities of the man who murdered mom. I've seen him a few times-he likes to taunt me. One day," Barry said, with venomous conviction, "He will mess up. And I'll be waiting. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if he were somehow responsible for getting me into this," he made a gesture to everything around him, "mess. I'm stuck in the past with no easy answer for how to get home."

Joe didn't say anything for the rest of the car ride.

**Present Time. **

"Well at least Bivolo is back in his proper time, which makes one less thing we have to worry about," commented Dr. Wells, as if nothing was wrong.

Everyone in the room kept staring at him.

"What?"

A few minutes earlier, Bivolo had been thrown through a time storm, accompanied by whatever was originally going to come through.

The, "whatever was going to come through," turned out to be a few animals.

From the ice age.

The Gkyptodontidae, or as more accurately described by Cisco, "The armadillo the size of a freaking car," didn't do much. It landed in the lab, then moved to the left a little bit and began chewing on the leftover Subway sandwiches, unconcerned with everything else around it.

The sabertoothed tiger was another story.

It landed with a hiss, then leaped directly at Cisco. Joe whipped off a few shots, but they were next to useless. Cisco leapt behind his desk in one wild leap, trying to make himself a moving target. Claudius hit the ground, taking Caitlyn with him, then slowly reached for his blade.

Surprising everyone, Dr. Wells picked up a syringe that had been laying around as a possible Barry sedative, held it in his hands for a few seconds, then whipped it through the air like a dagger.

The needlepoint end found its mark in the side of the tigers neck, and within a few feet of Cisco, dropped to the floor unconscious.

Cisco sharply let out a terrified squeak, then turned to stare at Wells, as did the rest of the room.

"Well at least Bivolo is back in his proper time, which makes one less thing we have to worry about."

**The Past.**

Barry and Joe walked slowly up to the door of the Allen house, not quite sure what to do next. Until further notice, Henry would just have to deal with his house acting as headquarters.

Joe rang the doorbell.

Nora opened the door, but stood frozen looking at Barry.

Feeling a surge of protectiveness for the boy after hearing his story, Joe ushered Barry inside so he didn't have to be stared at.

When they both entered the living room, every occupant of the house turned to look at him.

Barry couldn't believe his eyes. "Dr. Wells? What are you doing here?" he sputtered.

Joe looked a little confused. "You know this guy?"

Henry's lips were pressed together in a thin line. "More importantly, we all know him," said Henry with a deadly calmness, staring directly at Barry.

Barry's blood went cold. _They know. _

_And I just told Joe everything. _

Henry could barely get two words out. "Hello Barry."

* * *

_A/N: So, this chapter is attempt two. The first version...well..Its kind of like fight club. We don't talk about it. Thank goodness Mumble knocked sense into my sleep deprived brain._

_-2whitie_

**You did the thing... The syringe thing. You did it. _Yessssss..._**

**-Mumble**


	6. Moving Foward

Time froze.

Not in the literal sense, which considering recent events, was a very distinct possibility. But for a single moment that, everything around Joe froze. Noise faded and unimportant objects blurred into insignificant little patches of color as he tried to process the latest revelation. After the day's marathon of surprises, twists, emotional rollercoasters, and revelations about the nature of the world, he should have been purged of the emotion to feel surprise. "Should" being the key term.

Up until this point, he had been delaying the acceptance that time travel was a thing, and was putting off processing what he didn't have time to think about. He had concentrated on the things he could fix and tucked away everything irrelevant to drool over at a later time. His ability to only concentrate on what was important at the time was one of the qualities that made him such an effective cop.

Suddenly, the strange young man in front of him was no longer someone to be dealt with later.

This was an adult Barry Allen. He didn't even doubt it for a minute.

All those little details that he had tucked away came rushing to the surface. Normally, he lived for these moments - moments when all the evidence came together in a blinding rush and all the little pieces morphed into a whole in his mind and a mystery came together. This time, every detail that dropped into place felt like a punch in gut.

"_My mother was murdered."_

"_The police arrested my father."_

"_Nobody believed me when I told them it was someone else."_

"_I moved in with the cop who arrested my dad."_

"_The name I used on my fake college I.D was Wally West."_

He ignored everyone else around him. He ignored the sputtering coming from little Barry and Iris from the living room. The frantic eye movements being made by a slim unfamiliar man with glasses who just couldn't decide who to look at, normal Barry or older Barry. The slight woman next to him, her mouth curved in a shocked, "O," presumably his wife. He ignored the trembling of Henry Allen - poor man - and Nora.

As he started to process everything again, time slowly started moving forward. In front on him the young man - Barry - was barely able to get out a word.

"Huh?" Barry rasped in a small, disbelieving tone.

For a minute, everyone wrestled with the question that wanted to ask, then spent another minute trying to figure out how they wanted to ask it.

Finally, Henry did what he did to every guest in the Allen household. He invited them into the living room to sit.

Glad of something to do, Barry shuffled into the living room and sat down gingerly on the couch farthest away from the group hanging out in the doorway.

Barry honestly could not remember a more awkward situation in his entire life, and buried his head in his hands, refusing to look at anybody.

Finally, Dr. Wells broke the silence in a desperate attempt to regulate the situation. "Well, this got awkward fast."

Not managing to stop a small smile from gracing his face at the very un-Wells-like comment, Barry noticed the VeggieTales bandaid on his younger self's arm where needles generally went in to draw blood. Being a scientist himself, it didn't take much thought to figure out what Dr. Wells would want. With the practice of one who has done something over and over, Barry rolled up his sleeve and extended his long arm like he had done so many times for Caitlyn.

Dr. Wells started, a little surprised that Mr. Allen would know what he was going to ask for without being prompted, pulled out a second syringe, drew the blood and passed the syringe off to his wife who mouthed a _thank you_ to Barry.

Barry took a second to compose himself, then mustered up all the courage he had. He looked up at his mother for the first time in years. "Hello mother," he said, softly, his eyes welling up with tears.

Nora strode across the room. She and Barry had always had a close bond from the moment he was born, and it didn't matter where Barry had been or what time he had come from, she had always known exactly what Barry needed. Right now…

Right now he needed a hug.

Before he even knew what was happening, he was caught up in a warm hug that seemed to envelop his entire body. His mom was shorter than him now, but he was too caught up in the long-forgotten scent of cinnamon perfume to really take notice of the fact.

For someone who had cried at pretty much everything else that night, Barry couldn't find it within himself to cry anymore. In that moment, he had a feeling that everything was going to be all right.

Everyone else in the room was consciously looking at pretty much anything else, except for little Barry, who was staring at his older self with his mouth dropped open.

Finally, Nora gently pulled herself out of the hug when it became clear Barry wasn't letting go anytime soon, then walked him over back to the couch and sat him down, analyzing every bit of him as she did so. Same hair color, combed neatly. Tucked in clothes, tall, lanky, but the same inquisitiveness present in his eyes.

Seeing that all the touchy-feely stuff was pretty much over, Joe gave a little cough. Instinctively, Older Barry looked up and instantly regretted it, knowing the many looks of Joe West, and not liking the one he saw.

It was the interrogation face. Barry cracked under it every time.

…..

**Star Labs. The Present. **

After learning their lesson via saber-toothed tiger, weapons were kept close to hand. Cisco and Caitlyn placed tasers in their work areas, under the assumption that firing one took no more skill than aiming a Nerf gun. His gun was Joe's weapon of choice, and he waved off all offers from Cisco to make him something cooler, operating under the secret fear that Cisco would one day blow them all to tiny pieces. Dr. Wells just mumbled something about sticking close to Claudius, whose sword never left his side anyway. Claudius was of the opinion that if the future was filled with random lightning storms, footlong sandwiches and tiny handheld cannons called "Guns," then the future was in good hands.

After the Rainbow Raider was forcibly thrust out of the timestream, he skidded across the slick floor and miraculously landed in a couch. Without properly looking at his surroundings, he threw up his hands to shield his head as Joe clicked off the safety as everyone exploded into a flurry of motion. They had one chance to get this right before Bivolo forced them to turn on each other.

Cisco fired first. His taser would have hit home had Bivolo not thrown himself out of the way. He was trying to bolt for the door to freedom, while STAR Labs was simultaneously trying to keep him from leaving and getting close enough to use his powers at the same time. Caitlyn rolled over to the computer console after ducking behind her desk and smacked the panic button established after the whole Blackout incident. Every door in the facility started to close, heavy duty locks clicked into place, and glass partitioned areas had a bulletproof layer slide down over the normal glass.

Claudius looked ready to charge, and already had his sword out until Dr. Wells shouted a string of Latin phrases indicating a better plan. Used to following orders with question, Claudius changed direction on his heel, leaped onto the desk, and jumped two meters forward without hesitation, swinging his roman pilus into the light.

Instantly, the room was plunged into abject darkness. Nobody moved. For a second, there was nothing but silence, the shadows swallowing up everything in sight, even sound.

Then a loud thump reverberated throughout the room, followed by the sound of a body hitting the floor.

After a minute more of nothing, Harrison felt around the area until he found a blowtorch that Cisco had been using to set Gummi Bears on fire the previous week used a pocket match to turn the much bigger light source on, illuminating sections of the room with jumping flares of light.

Bivolo was out cold after Claudius had landed on him. Joe was still aiming his gun at the prone form, and Caitlyn and Cisco were underneath the desk.

Nobody was dead. Crisis averted.

Without a word, Cisco started dragging off Bivolo's prone form toward the pipeline. Before he left the room, he paused. "How much more time do we have now that Bivolo is back?"

After running through a few calculations in his head, Dr. Wells pursed his lips. "Definitely at least four more hours. If Mardon was returned, we might have enough temporal wiggle room to try set this entire mess straight."

**The Past. **

Barry knew he was a horrible liar under good circumstances. He was, if at all possible, a worse liar under emotional circumstances.

This definitely qualified as an emotional circumstance.

Joe was asking him probing questions about his real reason for being there, without bringing up the elephant in the room that only him and Joe were aware of. The elephant being the tragedy coming for the Allens in the uncomfortably close future. His dad was asking unanswerable questions. He ended up sticking to a variation of two answers; "I can't tell you," and "Long story." After nearly an hour of getting nowhere, Joe took the silent cues that Henry had been sending him and took Iris upstairs to try to have her get a little shuteye, much to Iris's protests.

Tess Morgan and Harrison Wells had been silent through most of it. At one point, Little Barry had come closer to look at the blood sample that had been taken, and had been shown what each of the markers meant while the repetitive interrogation had taken place. He was currently being bounced on Dr. Well's leg while Tess was alternately smiling at the way Harrison was dealing with the child and scanning the room.

In the small hamper where Barry stuffed the STAR Labs sweatshirt he had arrived in, ready to be put back on in an effort to avoid leaving anything from the future in the past, she saw it. A sweatshirt emblazoned with the words STAR LABS.

She raised her eyebrow, a small smile playing around her lips. "STAR Labs?"

Adult Barry smiled shyly back, the first one all night. "Congratulations."

Dr. Wells looked up, and earlier conversation about dream names for their future companies replaying through his head. "Do we know each other in the future?"

Figuring it was useless to lie, Barry nodded. "I sort of do a little work on the side with STAR Labs alongside my job as a forensic scientist."

"What kind of work?" piped up his younger self.

Racking his brain for normal sounding examples, he soon gave up. "Everything really. STAR Labs has sort of given me a crash course in everything science related."

Sensing that there were fond memories attached to the story, Nora leaned forward a bit. "Any friends?"

Figures that after watching Barry get beat up, chased down, shoved into trash cans, and not even bothering with birthday parties due to lack of friends outside of Iris, his mom wanted to know that everything turned out well

"Very good friends. In Central and beyond."

Before he could continue, his dad got up and went to the fridge and grabbed sodas for everyone. "We might be here more a while," was his explanation. He also distributed the food that hadn't been ruined by Barry's table-belly flop into the past.

After taking a long swig of root beer that he hadn't realized he wanted until that moment, Barry continued, figuring general descriptions couldn't hurt. "There's Dr. Wells here. Then there's an engineer who can literally make anything and keeps everyone laughing. All the time."

He paused, trying to make his descriptions a bit better. "There's a biologist that is also an M.D. She pretty much plays mom to the rest of us, makes sure we don't get ourselves hurt or act excessively stupid around the explosives." With that, he gave his younger self a pointed look. "That's right. Explosives. You have a lot to look forward to."

Finally, he gave a brief explanation on everyone else who had recently entered his life. "Over in Starling there's an archer who is one of the coolest people I have ever met, a computer whiz, and an ex Special Forces bodyguard."

His dad raised an eyebrow. "Archery. That's one you don't hear about everyday."

Barry shrugged. "It's more common than you think."

Generic stories were spilled. Barry gave a few anecdotes about some of the stuff that he'd done, editing out specifics and metahumans. Nobody in the room addressed the topic that Barry had admitted to having abilities earlier in the night, and Joe didn't talk at all. Nobody wanted to address the questions that everyone actually wanted answers to. The calm before the storm.

In the middle of a story about the time Iris and he had hidden in the then Detective Singh's desk trying to pretend they were spies, an incident that resulted in Singh scooting in his chair only to smack Barry in the face, resulting in Singh screaming louder than Barry, his eyelids started to droop. Before he knew it, his mom murmured something to his Dad, who suddenly announced that enough was enough and Barry needed to be put to bed.

As much as he hated to admit it, Barry knew he was right. If the reports Joe had been reading earlier in the station were correct, then Mark Mardon was on the loose, and Barry was no use to anyone passed out from exhaustion. He said the most awkward goodnight ever, then trundled up to the guestroom, but not before being pulled aside by Joe.

"What you said earlier about your mother..." he rumbled threateningly, "I hope you have a plan in mind for fixing it."

Truth be told, Barry had thought about it. He could tell his parents to take a vacation on those days. He could remove all the knives from the house. He had power over his past and future all at the same time. But at the same time, he was a nerd. He had read up on time travel since he was a kid. Iris had halfway listening to his excited ramblings and brought him a spool of thread from home, only for Barry to explain that string theory did not involve actual string. Point is, he had an idea about how the system worked. Mess with time and it messed with you right back.

Barry lowered his voice. "Yes and no. I want to see if it's just a better option to prevent the man in yellow by dealing with him directly instead of laying the seeds here and hoping things work out for the best."

With a nod, Joe let go of his arm. It would have to do.

In the living room, Dr. Wells was shaking hands with Henry and thanking him for his hospitality. After exchanging looks with his wife, he beckoned over Nora and spoke softly.

"We have a theory. If we are wrong, well, your son may have no way to get back to normal time until he opened up more about the future. If we are right however..." H_is words trailed off, looking desperately at his wife._

Tess took over confidently, as was her way. "If we are right, it's about to get really crazy."

* * *

_A/N: Sooo..AP courses happened. Among many other things. Including a spider bite that put me out of the writing/typing/moving game for a few days. I know it's sort of a filler chapter, but it sort of set things up for the end. As much as I like this story, I'm eager to work on a true collab with Mumble. We...we have a few ideas. *cackles. It will (hopefully) put a more Flarrowverse spin on a villain from the comics that I honestly don't think the show will either get to for a while or use as a big bad just because of the parallels the ensuing plotline would have to the League of Assassins. If anyone has any tips about writing collabs, I'd love to hear them!_

_-2whitie_

**OOOO, WE'RE GONNA ACTUALLY DO THAT ONE?! 8D *drools* You'll have to write the guy's name down for me so I can Google him or something... This should be fun. I need to cut to the song in my fic, too, though... I've been busy with homework, AP, and my monstrous gargantuan annual photoshop commission though, so yeah. I'll get to it. *sheepish grin***

**-Mumble**

_That American identity/innovation research paper tho..._

_-2whitie_


	7. Tornado

To be perfectly honest, Barry had gotten used to waking up uncomfortably. Before he moved back in with Joe, the bed in his apartment had been hard as a brick, resulting in Barry preferring to sleep in his puffy chair in the lab. Additionally, ever since he became the Flash, there had been a few times too many where he woke up in a hospital bed, usually regretting his life choices as his body throbbed in pain.

So before he got his bearing, Barry spent a few wonderful moments enjoying the feeling of waking up in a bed that felt like a giant marshmallow. Then he remembered where he was.

Barry practically flew out of bed, the covers falling off of him as he frantically tumbled forward, trying to untangle his mess of limbs in a pathetic attempt to escape from the bed. Violently rubbing his eyes to try to wake up faster, the reality of the situation was starting to sink in all over again. Not only was he stuck in the past, he was stuck in his parents house, a prime position to wreck the timestream and the future.

As he made his way toward the door, something in the edge of his vision caught his eye. Folded on the chair near his bed were two neat little piles of clothes. One was his STAR Labs sweatshirt, sweatpants, and shoes from yesterday - or years in the future, depending on how you viewed it. The second was a clean, light blue linen shirt with tan pants and brown shoes. His dad's favored work outfit.

Looking down at the outfit he had purchased last night and slept in, he realized just how wrinkled it was, and that it was nice to have something else to wear. With a shrug, he pulled off the sweater over his head, put his arms into the blue shirt and started to work on the buttons. As he started to fasten the belt, it struck him that he was wearing his father's clothes. Not that he hadn't already abstractly realized this, but it occurred to him that his parents were just as thrown off by this whole situation as he was. They didn't have the curse of knowing what was coming, but at least he was sort of accustomed to having weird things happen to him on a pretty much daily basis. They didn't. In a sort of gesture of acceptance of the entire situation, his mom gave him his father's clothes to wear, acknowledgement that he was all grown up now.

He was a different person than they knew, yet still very much the same.

On a hunch, he checked the pockets of the pants and pulled out a faded receipt from the comic book store. The date on it was the year his father graduated. Apparently, his parents had to do some digging into some old boxes from the attic to find clothes that would fit his slim frame.

Trying not to feel like he was a little kid playing dress up, he tried the doorknob a few times before he was able to open it. For some reason, he was more nervous today than he was yesterday.

Picking his way around the furniture to the staircase that led downstairs, he heard a muffled giggle followed by a hissed shushing noise. Turning, he walked to his younger self's room and opened the door slowly, only to find his younger self and Iris hiding under a blanket fort, pretending to be asleep. He bent over until his mouth was right next to little Barry's ear. "What are you doing?" he whispered.

His younger self kept his eyes squeezed shut. "Nothing."

"Nothing" was clearly a lie. Underneath the fort, there were candy wrappers, soda cans, binoculars, and a notebook with a pencil held fast in the spiral.

"Were you on a stakeout spying on _yourself_?"

Iris broke first. "Well, when you put it that way…"

Barry fought to keep a grin from spreading across his face. "Did you even do the homework that was today for class?"

Iris actually looked a little angry. "Who are you, Dad?"

Little Barry, predictably, looked guilty. "No. We didn't even start."

Iris looked at his younger self smugly. "I put my name at the top of it."

Mini Barry shot her a dirty look, while older Barry rubbed his eyes. He didn't want anything else from this timeline to change, and he distinctly remembered earning a massive bag of jellybeans for turning all of his homework in on time at the end of the year. He also didn't think that the excuse of "My future self with superpowers came back in time and caused me to stay up all night" was a valid one.

"How about I help you with it, just this once," he offered.

After a whirlwind of activity involving the fetching of backpacks and pencils, little Iris and Barry were seated in front of him criss cross applesauce while he lowered himself onto his old bed.

Apparently, all they had to do was science vocab. Nice. Barry was picturing having to speed-write a small essay. He picked up their science textbook with a picture of a stick figure scientist holding up a beaker with a bright blue liquid on it, and smiled at the large text and all of the pictures. Ah, memories.

In the time it took to finish the worksheet, everyone else had gathered in the kitchen below. Dr. Wells and Tess Morgan had gone back home to sleep and grab anything they needed, his parents had brewed coffee in order to maintain some resemblance of normality, and anyone who needed to call into work to tell their employers exactly how sick they were had done so.

The kids thundered down the stairs and raided the fridge for orange juice and yogurt while trying to put on their backpacks. In an effort not to make anything more chaotic than it already was, Barry faded into the back trying to go unnoticed. It was already awkward enough that he and his father were pretty much dressed the same. Heh.

The school wasn't too far from the Allen house, and Barry had always, for as long as he could remember, walked to school, sometimes with Iris and sometimes not. This morning would be no different, but Barry was struck with sudden worry.

"In the future, Joe arrests Clyde Mardon. You know, the guy you were originally assigned to take down yesterday."

Everyone in the kitchen stopped talking and looked at him. Barry stepped further out of the shadows to voice his concern. Before Joe could ask, Barry nodded to Iris. "She told me yesterday who you were originally were assigned to. I just think might be the Clyde Mardon from my time, not yours. If it is, then who do you think Mardon is going to come after first?"

Joe didn't even need the helpful gesture toward Iris, nor did he need to know that Clyde would probably be peeved at him not for trying to arrest him, but for shooting to kill at him. He immediately reached for the phone. "Iris and Barry should just stay home today."

Barry shook his head. "We need to keep the timestream as similar as the original one was. Mardon has no idea where they, I mean, I, well, whatever, go to school. He will only be a problem if he catches them on the way to school while he come here."

Joe hardened his gaze, and looked at the scientists.

Both Dr. Wells and Tess nodded. "Best to keep the timestream as similar as possible," they said in unison, then smiled dopily at each other.

Henry stepped in with a compromise. "Why don't you go with them, Joe? In fact, I'd feel better if both of us went with them to school."

Barry butted in. "Maybe me and Joe could go. If it's the Mardon from the future, then he's a metahuman. It would be better to have me there. Just in case."

Despite not knowing what he really meant, his Dad nodded slowly. From the little he was aware of, it made sense.

"Besides," said Barry with a little mischievous smile, "If anyone asks why I'm dropping off my younger self at school, I can just say we are related. After all, we do look alike."

After the little group had left, Harrison, Tess, Henry and Nora sat around the kitchen table.

"Joe said you two had a theory about Barry," prompted Henry.

Tess pushed a lock of hair from her face flippantly in a vain attempt to hide her thoughts about the entire situation. "The way he got into the past may have to do with his strange body makeup, but that's hardly important right now if he can't get back. I think that since he clearly doesn't remember anything that is currently happening, we are in a parallel universe that parted from the original when Barry traveled back in time, or we are still in the original timeline and something happens so that Barry and everyone here forgets everything we saw and learned."

Dr. Wells leaned forward. "The lightning storms? They are probably just trying to repair time, or they are there to help rip this parallel universe fully away from the other."

"Which course of action would, in your opinion, be the best to take?" asked Nora.

"Until we know for sure, it's probably best to preserve the timeline as it is," answered Dr. Wells. "And everything and everyone in it," he continued under his breath, looking at Tess.

Nobody but Nora noticed.

After the realization that there was nothing any of them could do, Henry stood up from the table and said something about looking at that DNA sample and seeing if he could pry any clues from it. Tess, being more medically minded than Harrison, quickly volunteered to help him.

Before Harrison could leave to find the extra sample secured in his lab, Nora pulled him aside.

"You're going to propose, aren't you?"

As his eyes widened in panic, Nora made a calming motion with her hand. "I used to be a counselor before I quit to raise Barry. I just know these things."

Tomato-red face coloring was beginning to set in.

Nora smiled softly. "Have a plan?"

Harrison looked down at his converse. "She loves the beach. I'll ask her to go on a road trip with me, and drive down there. When we get there, I'm going to show her a basket of rocks I have, a stone taken outside of every place we had a date. Then I guess I'll ask." At this, he pulled a small band of gold from his pocket. It was delicate piece of craftsmanship, with a simple but dazzling diamond worked into the center. Without a doubt, Nora knew that this was a custom made ring that had clearly required a lot of time and thought into making it.

With a calm assurance that there was no way she would say no, Nora picked up the abandoned coffee cups on the table. "To the future? "

Smiling, Dr. Wells clinked the mugs before taking a small sip. "To the future, and all it brings."

...

**The future**

"There's an excellent chance that Barry finally figured out that he can't just go have a party in the past," said Caitlin as she put her armful of tribbles on one of the desks that was less ruined than the others. "That was a lot closer temporally than the others."

Dr. Wells nodded in agreement. "1970 is closer than the Ice Age."

Cisco was just upset he missed the incident. He had stepped outside for a few minutes for a slushie refill only to find that a few refugees from a Star Trek convention had made it through the time storm. After about thirty seconds of hurried explanations about time collapsing and pleasepleaseplease go right back to where they came from, they left after giving a sizable donation of fluffy tribbles to Caitlin, who, as they put it, "didn't need Harry Mudd's Venus drug," to aid her beauty."

Nerds.

Wells joined Cisco in mild pouting after the time hole opened to take Claudius back. He had found him fascinating and a very loyal character, and seemed a bit sad to see him go.

As the time hole closed around the Roman, Caitlyn asked how the timestream seemed to be doing.

Dr. Wells peeked at the stats on his tablet. "Time is still unraveling, but thanks to Barry seemingly making an effort to limit the changes he makes, the progression of damage has slowed down considerably. If he can return Mardon to us, it would be even better."

Cisco took a quick sip of slushie. "What if we could communicate with him?"

Dr. Wells tilted his head, a sign of deep thought for him. "I suppose we could tell him how to fix the minor stuff on his end. It might stop the time holes from eating away at the timeline."

Cisco picked up his favorite screwdriver and a piece of titanium. "Better get to work then. I prefer my timeline looking a little less like swiss cheese."

As she spun her chair up to the monitors looking for additional time-storms, Caitlyn paused. "Where would you send it? The communicator, I mean."

Cisco shrugged. "With the amount of damage Barry was causing there in the beginning, I'm guessing he was mucking around his personal timeline. I was just going to send it to his old house."

…..

**The Past**

It was almost funny how much his younger self had gotten used to the novelty of having his older self around. He and Iris had linked arms and happily skipped ahead under the watchful eye of himself and Joe. The cop's eyes flickered between the kids a few feet ahead and the young man next to him, who was studiously avoiding his gaze.

Finally, after they had covered half of the distance to the school, their uncomfortable silence made less so by birdsong, Joe asked Barry about Mardon.

"So, he's a metahuman?"

Barry nodded. "Yep. Controls the weather. Last time I saw Clyde, he was whipping up a tornado in a barn outside the city."

Ignoring the whole tornado bit, Joe raised his eyebrows. "A barn, you say?"

Barry made a hesitant little face. "I doubt he'll be there again. You got him there twice - when he became a metahuman and again when he was creating a tornado, which is when I'm assuming he was grabbed from by the time...thing."

Joe's face was tired. "I'm not sure I want to know, but how does one even become a metahuman?"

The question got a tired chuckle out of Barry. "Just by being in the wrong place at the wrong time." He paused, then looked at Joe. When he realized that Joe was silently asking for more information, he continued. "I got hit by lightning made up of dark matter in my lab. **I **Woke up from the coma it put me in only to find out that there were a lot of other people in my situation. Not my exact one - as a general rule, nobody seems to have the same abilities unless they are related."

"How are the police handling it?" Typical Joe.

"They aren't. It took about two and a half months from the accident that created the dark matter storm that turned people into metahumans for the police to even acknowledge something was going on. Even when it's blatantly obvious something weird is going on, there is nothing the police can do about it. Hard to be proactive about catching someone when the suspect can just teleport away from a crime scene."

Joe felt a headache coming on from stresses that were to come. "So what is being done about the metahuman criminals?"

Silence.

"Barry…"

His face was redder than a tomato. "It's...being handled."

"Barry…" It's didn't matter how old the boy was. He spilled whatever you wanted to figure out if you just repeated his name enough times.

"I'm sort of the one dealing with it."

"Mind telling me how?" Joe was already shifting into the tone of voice he used on Iris when she was in trouble. A tone Barry was all too familiar with.

"Uh. Heh."

Joe rubbed his face with his hands and let a low groan out. "I am not going to like this, am I?"

Staring at his shoes was a tactic that Barry employed when he didn't want to look someone in the eye while delivering bad news. Unfortunately, he was currently wearing his father's shoes, which just made it worse. Finally, he settled on staring straight ahead. "You know that archer I mentioned?"

"Yes," Joe ground out. It was clear that he was already going to disapprove of his actions.

"What I didn't mention was that he's actually a vigilante who runs around Starling City's rooftops shooting arrows into criminals and acts as sort of a freelance agent to deal with international issues and assassins. He's no casual fighter who was just disgruntled with the city, he's the real deal. I've seen him..." Barry trailed off, seeing as Joe was about to explode. The idea of a vigilante was not on Joe's "Okay" list.

Barry picked up again nervously. "Not the point. Anyway, through actions that were not my own, I ended up sort of helping him, aaaaand then I went into a coma. When I woke up and found I was a metahuman, I sort followed his lead for Central, except without the whole 'critically injuring suspects' thing."

At this point, Joe looked like he was about to strangle Barry. "So let me get this straight…"

Barry winced.

"You, as a cop working for the precinct, decided that the police were not doing enough, and without telling anyone, decided to go around breaking the law and taking the law into your own hands."

Barry saw the opening and jumped in. "Well, the fight between metahumans and the police is pretty one-sided. One guy who could turn himself into poison gas just sort of drifted away from the crime scene, and there was nothing anybody could do about it. Anyway, it's not like I don't have help."

Joe started to put things together. "Earlier, you said you worked a little bit with Dr. Wells. Is this what you meant?"

Barry nodded for the third time, glad that the worst part of the conversation was over. "Yup. After I woke up and dealt with my first meta, Clyde Mardon, he sort of agreed to help. I got a suit that resists friction so it doesn't burn around me and started using my abilities to help people and find the man who murdered mom. Cisco, the engineer, builds the gadgets to help me out. Caitlyn, the MD, patches me up when I get myself hurt."

Joe turned his eyes toward the sun. "Exactly how do I fit into all of this?"

Barry shrugged. "You Help me out with the investigation stuff, or go with Cisco and Caitlyn when they, very rarely, go out into the field." He narrowed his eyes. "You and Cisco work really well together, oddly enough. It's like watching a buddy cop comedy."

"What about Caitlyn and Dr. Wells?" asked Joe, who finally hit upon what Barry was dancing around.

"You and Caitlyn are usually on the same page when it comes to which risks are acceptable are which are not. On the other hand, It's no secret you and Dr. Wells don't get along, which is sort of why I don't even ask questions when both of you agree that a certain course of action is the right one."

Out of all the things that Barry had admitted to, that was the chunk of information that rang false in Joe's mind. "Barry, I rarely change my opinion of people, and I got a good reading off of the Dr. Wells that's hanging out in your old house."

Barry finally gave the nagging in the back of his head a voice. "Yeah, I swear, it almost seems as if-" Suddenly, he stopped and held up a single finger. "Barry, Iris," he yelled, "Come here."

Both kids turned and joined Joe in looking at Barry with confusion. Barry was less concentrated on the looks focused on him than the storm gathering in the sky above him. Joe looked up too, and immediately caught on. Without bothering to explain, he grabbed little Barry and Iris by their backpacks and shoved them into the shrubbery on the side of the road, ignoring their protests.

The birds had gone silent.

Clyde Mardon strode out from behind the car. "You again."

Barry glared at him, making sure not to show an ounce of weakness. "I could say the same to you."

Deciding to forego the typical monologue, Clyde jerked a hand forward, summoning a huge gust of wind that sent Barry spiraling through the air.

With the exception of the little party tricks Barry used during the Bivolo incident, this was the first time that Joe had really seen a metahuman attack. The fear puddling in the pit of his stomach was no longer fear of the unknown; it was fear of the idea that he could get shredded to pieces by Mardon, and there was absolutely nothing he could do about it.

Barry, for his part, didn't crash into the ground. Since his team had realized how many times an enemy metahuman had thrown Barry through the air, it had become a part of Barry's training to know what to do in case he couldn't touch the ground.

As soon as he was at the peak of his flight, he twisted his body around so that both arms were facing the ground. Knowing he looked ridiculous but not really caring, he started waving his arms around frantically, creating little whooshes of air under him that softened his landing to a gentle thud.

He sprung to his feet, catlike and started running at Mardon before he was completely aware of his increasingly rainy surroundings. The weather metahuman was forming a ball of ice in his hand and was clearly going to assault Joe with his hailstone that looked like the size of a cantaloupe. With an almost animalistic cry, Barry leapt at the hailstone as it left Mardon's hand, caught it, then used his speed-enhanced legs to punt it out of the neighborhood.

Someone somewhere in Central City was going to have hail damage.

He grabbed Joe, then sped him to where his younger self and Iris already were in the bushes. Now he no longer had anybody to worry about; it was just him and Mardon.

Mardon didn't hesitate. The wind immediately picked up around both of them, burning Barry's eyes with its intensity. The telltale sparks of lightning started to crackle around Barry, and he knew that if a major storm got off the ground, the game would be over. Barry noticed the ice crystals forming in the clouds and a vague idea started forming.

Growing up in the Midwest, known to most Americans as Tornado Alley (Despite the lack of regular tornadoes), Barry knew quite a bit about tornadoes. He knew that if a tornado siren went off, there was no need to really get worried until the telephone poles started flying. He knew ditches were an ideal place to lay down in if you were caught outside during a twister. He knew that most native midwesterners had an inherent flippant attitude towards the windy little beasts that was displayed by either grabbing lawnchairs and snacks when one was announced or dressing up in a banana outfit for the stormchaser cameras. He also knew that Tornadoes were caused by warm air and cold air colliding in the atmosphere due to the region's bipolar weather pattern. They were unpredictable, uncontrollable, and if, as memory served, Mardon had issues controlling one, his power would spin out of control if several popped up.

And as Barry knew from his own fainting experiences, once a metahuman extended their abilities farther than they could handle, they were out for the count.

Running back and forth to create as much friction and warmth as possible, Barry waved his hands back and forth to encourage the warm air to mix with the cold air. It wasn't as easy as it sounded-the rain and wind were increasing, and the constant buffeting was sapping his strength.

Normally, it took a while for tornadoes to actually form, but Barry helped the mini storms along by running in circular motions to help the signature spiral of the storms. Eventually, his slightly overthought plan started to pay off. Miniature tornadoes started to form in Mardon's storm, spitting rain and hail everywhere, and sucking up Mardon's wind.

The wind was getting stronger, and the bolts Mardon had been throwing were becoming more erratic. Mardon was losing control. Time to go in for the kill.

Nearly encased in a tube of mist and wind, Mardon stood at the center of the maelstrom, screaming obscenities. Even with his superspeed to aid him, Barry had difficulty running through the massive gales of wind. Little by little, he worked his way toward him. Even as he got closer, though, he seemed to be flagging. The fight and constant use of his powers in an offensive manner and mental stress of not having his team to shout advice, information or encouragement was taking it's toll. With a fierce yell, Barry pulled from deep reserves of strength and unknowingly encased his body in flickers of lightning as he sprinted dead-on at Mardon.

They went down together in a mess of limbs and fists. Mardon backhanded Barry in the gut as Barry slammed his shoulder into Mardon's chest. Barry knew he had to end this before a chance lighting strike or massive hailstone finished the fight more him.

Almost unnoticeable in the chaos, like with Bivolo the previous day, a timestorm appeared, this time with the farmhouse in the background. With an almighty kick, Barry booted Mardon straight through with a yell of triumph before the weather metahuman even knew what was happening.

Just as quickly as it had started, the angry weather stopped. Blue skies once again reigned, and day was calm and peaceful once again.

Without missing a beat, Barry rushed forward, grabbed his younger self and Iris and ran them off to school. The whole point of him being there in the first place was to keep time as normal as possible, and Barry was scheduled to be at school, not hiding from the Midwest's first hurricane.

After dropping them off underneath the bleachers, he spun on his heel to get back to Joe, and then back to the house to see if there were any changes, like a lightning time storm thing waiting for him to jump into.

Barry was an optimist about these things.

**A/N: HOLY LONG CHAPTERS BATMAN... Mappy Christmahannukwanzikah to your followers I guess! xD The colossal wait was not in vain... Now you just need to kick my arse into getting a move on with Power Playing and everything will be rainbows and armadillos. ;D**

**-Mumble**

_Yeah, it's been a while. I've sort of just been..busy. Why am I not being a troll about Power Playing? *Hits Face. For those of you wondering about the midwest stuff, I'll give a quick explanantion of the DC universe for the newbies:_

_Most big cities mentioned in the comics correspond to a similar major city in real life. For instance, Gotham is another name for New York City, as coined by the guy who wrote Sleepy Hollow. Metropolis is suspected to be Chicago, Star City is suspected to be Minneapolis. (Different authors cite different landmarks/references to surrounding areas. Central has always clearly been indicated to be in the midwest, and used to be a city where the cattle were moved up and down, (Flash 1x04 and History Lessons by Brian Buccellato), limiting the possible states to North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. Judging by context clues about Central's relation to the ocean, it's not Texas. Central is supposed to be a huge midwestern town surrounded by the Gem cities, which means that Central has to be in the top 100 most populated cities in the US and surrounded by small towns and suburbs. The three cities that make the cut are Kansas City, Missouri combined with Kansas City, Kansas, Tulsa Oklahoma and Wichita, Kansas. _

_All three are in Tornado Alley. You are all welcome for my entirely too much planned out lesson on the possible location of Central City, since the official answers from the writers are all over the freaking board. _


End file.
